Parish records and historical accounts strongly indicate the earthquake's epicenter was northwest of Verviers, and the event was widely felt across Western Europe in modern-day Belgium, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France.

Researchers at the Royal Observatory of Belgium have considered this the strongest known earthquake in Western Europe north of the Alps,[2] which occurred as part of a sequence of quakes from the Lower Rhine Graben in September 1692.

Contemporaneous accounts of the earthquake and its destruction across Belgium and other countries enable scientists to approximate its epicenter, magnitude, and intensity as it spread outwards.

[3][5][6] Populations would have experienced "considerable damage or partial collapses" in buildings like homes and churches in addition to falling walls, columns, and monuments along with overturned furniture like barrels and bookshelves.

The house clearly shook, moved back and forth, so that in the dining room paintings were beaten against the gilded leather on the walls.The stone floor where I stood lifted slightly and fell again, several times for 10 to 12 seconds.

[15] Such seismic theophany reoccurs in English literature and recollections about the earthquake, but all sources on continental Europe date the main event as occurring on Thursday, 18 September 1692 at around 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

[10] Researchers from Royal Observatory of Belgium have determined there were seven significant aftershocks of the earthquake from 1692 to 1694, many of them occurring in the area of modern North Rhine-Westphalia.

Eastern Belgium is part of the Lower Rhine Graben, a system of faults which also run through the English Channel, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany.